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Top UN official to discuss human rights with hardline Taliban

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February 14, 2001 

KABUL--(AP) - After visiting a World Food Program bakery that provides bread to Kabul's poor women, a top United Nations official said Tuesday that he was saddened by the tragedy of Afghanistan, shattered by war and drought.

U.N. Undersecretary General Kenzo Oshima is on a five-day mission to the region to see the plight of tens of thousands of desperate Afghans, who are either refugees in their own country or who have fled to northwestern Pakistan.

"It is very sad to see the troubles of the Afghan people," he said in the beleaguered capital following a meeting with the Taliban's deputy foreign minister Abdul Rehman Zahid.

"People here are suffering so much," he said.

Oshima's tour of Afghanistan, which began Tuesday, will also take him to Faizabad in northeastern Afghanistan, and finally to Herat in western Afghanistan.

He called on the warring factions to end hostilities. The Taliban, who rule most of Afghanistan are battling their northern based opposition in northern areas of the country.

Oshima called on the Taliban leadership to find a peaceful end to the protracted civil war that has shattered the nation, now devastated by the worst drought in 30 years.

As well as humanitarian issues, U.N. officials in Kabul said Oshima was expected to take up the issue of human rights with the hardline Islamic militia, who have imposed harsh edicts, most of them directed against women.

Since taking control of the capital of Kabul in 1996, the Taliban have stopped women from working, closed schools for girls beyond eight years old and forced women to wear the all-encompassing burqa that covers them from head to toe.

Other lesser edicts forbid women from wearing white stockings, considered provocative by the Taliban rulers, suggest residents paint the first floor windows of their homes black to prevent prying eyes from seeing women inside.

Relations between the United Nations and the Taliban have been troubled since the ouster of President Burhanuddin Rabbani's feuding coalition in 1996 and the public hanging of Afghanistan's deposed President Najibullah, who had been living under U.N. protection in a U.N. compound in the Afghan capital.

The global body accuses the Taliban of massive human rights abuses against women and minority religious groups. The Taliban flatly deny discrimination charges. They say their treatment of women is in keeping with Islamic injunctions, but many Islamic scholars say it reflects tribal traditions not Islamic teachings.

Oshima also is to travel to western Herat where 80,000 Afghans are living in desperate conditions having been driven from their homes by a devastating drought that has killed most of the livestock in the country and ravaged crops.

Bitter cold and hunger has killed more than 500 refugees in Herat, most of them children.

Another 155,000 Afghans have fled to northwestern Pakistan where the U.N. is facing a crisis situation trying to provide clothing and shelter against freezing temperatures. Daily there are reports of deaths in the camps in Pakistan as well.